Exploring the Effectiveness of Service Decomposition in Fog Computing Architecture for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to connect everyday physical objects to the internet. These objects will produce a significant amount of data. The traditional cloud computing architecture aims to process data in the cloud. As a result, a significant amount of data needs to be communicated to the cloud. This creates a number of challenges, such as high communication latency between the devices and the cloud, increased energy consumption of devices during frequent data upload to the cloud, high bandwidth consumption, while making the network busy by sending the data continuously, and less privacy because of less control on the transmitted data to the server. Fog computing has been proposed to counter these weaknesses. Fog computing aims to process data at the edge and substantially eliminate the necessity of sending data to the cloud. However, combining the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) with the fog computing architecture is still an open challenge. In this paper, we propose to decompose services to create linked-microservices (LMS). Linked-microservices are services that run on multiple nodes but closely linked to their linked-partners. Linked-microservices allow distributing the computation across different computing nodes in the IoT architecture. Using four different types of architectures namely cloud, fog, hybrid and fog+cloud, we explore and demonstrate the effectiveness of service decomposition by applying four experiments to three different type of datasets. Evaluation of the four architectures shows that decomposing services into nodes reduce the data consumption over the network by 10% - 70%. Overall, these results indicate that the importance of decomposing services in the context of fog computing for enhancing the quality of service.